Arab humour

Here is a legendary fart from the 1001 Nights. I found it through the indefatigable tnh. This is not from Disney Arabia.

The qadi spent the forty days upon his bed in deep mortification, not daring to move for fear of complications and internal bleeding, and brooding all the time over his monstrous accident. “Surely my foes will accuse me of many ridiculous things,” he said to himself. “They will say that I have let myself be buggered in some extraordinary fashion, and that it is all very well for me to be severe in my judgments when I have given myself up to such strange immoralities that I can bear a child. As Allah lives, I am sure that they will accuse me of having been buggered, me, their virtuous qadi, and I have almost forgotten what it feels like!”

It is from a culture which feels there are no just limits to place on revenge. Perhaps the modern Arabs are more decadent: someone told me at the weekend that Dr Carey’s great talking shop on Middle Eastern peace had collapsed because the Muslims would not talk to Anglicans who have elected a gay man as bishop. The only possible response to this news is elsewhere in the story:

Then his pains increased, and he fell howling to the floor in a crisis of agony. Suddenly came relief. A long and thunderous fart broke from him, shaking the foundations of the house and throwing its utterer violently forward, so that he swooned. Then followed a multitude of other escapes, gradually diminishing in sound but rolling and re-echoing through the troubled air. Last came a single deafening explosion, and all was still.